His exit, which comes two years after the June 2012 acquisition of Yammer, follows standard timing. When companies are purchased, existing employees are often given two-year contracts, sometimes with earnouts attached. Sacks did his time, in other words.

One year after it purchased Yammer, Microsoft announced that the service had seen 55% account growth following the deal’s closing, to more than 8 million. Paid networks were up 100%.

Microsoft has worked to move Yammer into its Office 365 lineup. If you visit the Yammer pricing page, you can purchase the service for $3 per user per month, but Microsoft lists two separate Office 365 options that both include Yammer.

In a statement concerning Sacks’ departure, Microsoft commented that Yammer is now used by “more than 500,000 organizations.”

Yammer was recently tossed into more Office 365 SKUs, making it available for no extra charge to new groups of people. As such, it seems that Microsoft is content to make Yammer component to Office 365, and use it as a lever to ratchet up subscribers of the latter service.

0

Crunchbase

BioDavid Sacks is CEO of Zenefits. He is an Internet entrepreneur who was the founding CEO of Yammer and original COO and product leader of PayPal. He also produced the award-winning independent film Thank You For Smoking. He is an angel investor in tech companies like Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Houzz, SpaceX, and Palantir.